investigadoresACG.org

A brief report from Geologist Waldo Taylor Castillo of the Observatorio Sismológico y Volcanológico de Arenal y Miravalles (OSIVAM) on the increase in seismic activity since the earthquake of 5 September:

Sismicidad de la Cordillera Volcánica de Guanacaste y Tilarán

**Update 24 November**

From Waldo, spectra from the month of November with interpretation:

Espectros-nov-2012

Total rainfall in the admin area, Santa Rosa, was 1,210.8 mm, so a very dry year. Monthly breakdown below:

Krisz will be giving a talk at 7 PM on Monday October 29 in the Centro de Investigación, Santa Rosa.

“Climatic Effects on Relative Insect Abundance Across Four Habitats from May 2011 to July 2012″

She’ll do it in Spanish or English depending on who shows.

**Update 30 October**

Krisz adds:

Krisztina, María Marta and Felipe gathered in Santa Rosa last night to discuss Krisz’ findings on the effects of various climatic factors on relative insect abundance in Santa Rosa. The small group was a great opportunity to point out everything from the significance of the research to the grammatical errors in the presentation slides. Spreading scientific information, specifically what is going on in Santa Rosa, is useful in many ways and now, as the trend goes, participants in last night’s talk will continue to spread this information when talking to other park personnel or future researchers. We hope to see YOU at the next iACG talk next month. Stay tuned for details.

I attended from Oct. 1st to Oct. 3rd to a workshop called “Tools for managing and sharing Biodiversity Information” organized by CRBioin collaboration with the Global Biodiversity Information Facility and the Atlas of Living Australia, during these 3 days a group of 40 people learned about different global and local initiatives and tools (standards and available software) to share biodiversity data and information.

One of the most relevants topics was to learn about about the Darwin Core standard, which is used to homologate museums collections, investigators or other data bases and share this data with some tools like GIBIF and CRBio. Depending on the size of the data base it could be relatively easy to generate a Darwin Core archive of our data base using an excel template, once you have mapped your data base against Darwin Core this excel file can be processed with an online tool that generates the Darwin Core xml files so you can register and share them on GBIF. For bigger (100,000+ records) and complex data bases there is automated tool to generate the Darwin Core files called IPT, although this could be more complex to set up.

After that we learned a bit about Geographical Information Systems using Quatum SIG, an open source SIG, to use it later to generate species distribution models, which we made using data downloaded from GBIF and weather data from Worldclim  and a tool called Maxent  which allowed us to generate ecological nitch models. To understand a bit more the use of these models there were some talks, one that I found particularly interesting was “Ecological Nitch Models: The importance of scientific collections for Biopersity Conservation” by Adrian García of the Zoology Museum of UCR, where using these models they were able to find a frog that was declared extinct.

It’s important to point out that these tools are freely available and open source, which not only allows to use them with out licensing costs, but also some of these tools such as the one used for the GBIF and CRBio portals are available so we could think in the future to have a data base of this kind within the ACG using this same technology.

If you are interested in learning more of these topics you can find the links to slides of the workshop at informatics.inbio.ac.cr or contact me and I will gladly share more details.

Federico Matarrita

federico@usematics.com

Report from the National Seismological Network.

INFORME SOBRE CAMBIOS FÍSICOS DE DE LOS VOLCANES ACTIVOS DE COSTA RICA LUEGO DE UN MES DEL TERREMOTO DE SÁMARA.

If you don’t have much time here’s the nut. :

El volcán Rincón de la Vieja, presenta un lago caliente muy activo con una liberación inusual de gas con respecto al mes de abril del 2012 y con un color gris lechoso, debido a la mezcla de sedimentos, además de un aumento en la temperatura (48 °C). Además aumentó sensiblemente la actividad gaseosa.

No se excluye que la energía liberada por el terremoto de Sámara del 5 de setiembre del 2012 ocasione más cambios y perturben al menos los sistemas hidrotermales provocando aumento de temperatura de fluídos (agua y gases), mayor salida de gases, apertura de fracturas, deslizamientos, aumento en la sismicidad local y posibles erupciones freáticas.

Se recomienda que el acceso a los cráteres Rincón de la Vieja y Turrialba se mantenga restringido.

Briefly: Rincón is a bit hotter and gassier than usual, which could be a result of the recent earthquake, and we may see an increase in activity going forward. Recommendation is to maintain status quo and continue to restrict access to the crater.

Compañera Adriana Chavarria of Ecotourism invites all ACG users to attend the exhibition “Voices of Pedregal.”

More than 25 artists have created impressive works inspired by the petroglyphs of Maritza. The exhibition is currently located at CIEB

Don’t miss the opportunity to support the artists and to celebrate Costa Rica’s indigenous heritage.

If you aren’t in Costa Rica, you can view the works on facebook.

Thanks to Jennifer Powers and Peter Baumgartner and all who attended their talks the other night!

Another look at this year’s early rainfall, this time in comparison to the previous 12 years. Thanks again to Maria Marta.

Peter Baumgartner and Jennifer Powers will be giving talks on the 24th of August in the Centro de Investigaciones at 7pm. Peter studies geology in Santa Elena, and Jennifer is a long-time ACG researcher whose work focuses on ecosystem-level processes such as decomposition and carbon cycling in tropical dry forest.

Not only will you get to hear a couple of great talks, it’s a good chance to meet other researchers who are working in the ACG, so come on out and pass the word to anyone who may be interested.

Starting on August 21 CONAVI will be working on the culvert beneath the entrance road to Santa Rosa (near the big Cenizaro, see photo). The work is projected to take two weeks to complete. The road will remain open throughout the project, however there may be minor delays where traffic is stopped for a few minutes at a time. The ACG asks that you take these potential delays into account and that you please reduce your speed in and around the work zone.